Feeding the thousands {With just two hands}

All too often I wake up with the weight of the day’s tasks burdening my all-too-sleepy heart and body. I can become overwhelmed simply considering the needs of my nearly 100 students. I become even more overwhelmed when you add their families, my family, my coworkers and their families to my plate. Then, I turn on the news or open my internet’s home page…

Bombings.

Grief.

Sexual perversion. 

Victimized women and children. 

It is all too much. Simply too much. But, this morning, I want to encourage those of you who – like me – attempt all too often to shoulder the weight of many people’s pain and disease.

Let the words of this quote from a teenage girl serving orphans in Uganda sink deeply into your heart: “And even though I realize I cannot always mend or meet, I can enter in. I can enter into someone’s pain and sit with them and know. This is Jesus. Not that He apologizes for the hard and the hurt, but that He enters in, He comes with us to the hard places. And so I continue to enter.” (“Kisses from Katie,” p. 23).

Jesus, the Christ who broke the bread and fed thousands, lives in us. He took what He had on hand and began to give out and to give thanks. It multiplied in the giving. It multiplied as He felt their hunger and didn’t want them to “faint on the way.” He knew. His stomach growled with theirs.

Today, let us enter in. Not into the bombings halfway across the world. But, into the small hearts and precious lives around us. Today. We can’t fix, but we can know. Know the hard places with them. And, call on a Savior who gives and gives thanks.